a lover grateful
by Verity
Summary: a lover grateful for the flattering lies of a dream. Buffy dreams night after night of her return from the grave, but tonight, something's different. Set early in Season 6.


** Amante agradecido a las lisonjas mentirosas de un  
sueño**

¡Ay Floralba! Soñé que te ... ¿Dirélo?  
Sí, pues que sueño fue: que te gozaba.

¿Y quién, sino un amante que soñaba,  
juntara tanto infierno a tanto cielo?

Mis llamas con tu nieve y con tu yelo,  
cual suele opuestas flechas de su aljaba,  
mezclaba Amor, y honesto las mezclaba,  
como mi adoración en su desvelo.

Y dije: «Quiera Amor, quiera mi suerte,  
que nunca duerma yo, si estoy despierto,  
y que si duermo, que jamás despierte».

Mas desperté del dulce desconcierto;  
y vi que estuve vivo con la muerte,  
y vi que con la vida estaba muerto.

_Francisco de Quevedo_

**a lover grateful for the flattering lies of a dream** by verity

_this story is dedicated to mi querida Rebecca, whose wall gave this story to me._

Buffy Summers opened her mouth to air that tasted of death. The soft cotton sheets her mother had picked out cocooned her, the stifling warmth of her comforter twisted around her sweating body; but the weight of reality only shadowed the sensation of waking up from her death. Her own ghost assumed her body over and over again, until she was not sure who was Buffy, who was alive, who was real.

Every night, she tasted the same death and dark, woke up gasping between the fitful snatches of sleep she stole between her patrols and the advent of the sun. She moved through the day distractedly, as Willow helped Dawn with her homework, as Tara made them all dinner. Sometimes she sat outside instead of eating, passing the time by whittling stakes.

When the sun fell behind the trees, she left the house reluctantly, her duty more powerful than her wish to disappear, somehow, in the nooks and crannies of her home, between the eaves of the roof, into the piles of the carpet.

* * *

Tonight, Buffy opened her mouth to cool flesh. The same smell, the same place, but her lips met only skin, her lungs stifled. Her heart beat with a little flurry of panic, not like the usual horror and shock, but a strange mix of confusion and longing. She rolled over and fell out of the coffin, coughing and gasping, lying on the cemetery grass. Everything seemed to be changing. Around her weeds and flowers grew, faster and faster, until they surrounded her, swaying impassively in the wind around her corpse.

"Get up, get up," said a voice urgently, and she knew the voice, but couldn't place it. She coughed again, knowing she would never get the taste of that graveyard dust out of her mouth -- the taste of her body, her ashes, disintegrating blood and bone. "Come on, pet." More gently now, and a tug at her arm. "Not gonna hurt you."

She let herself be pulled up, this animated Buffy-shell. The weeds reached to her knees. "There're a hundred and forty-seven flowers here," said the voice she knew. "They're all for you, love." The voice was part of the body that held her by the arm, steadying her, pulling her close. She rested her cheek against the bare chest, and then her lips. A familiar sensation, now, but she couldn't place it. Her mind moved aimlessly from one thing to the next, and now she was bending down to touch a flower, but her hand was batted away.

"I'm cold" she said, and only then did she register that the Buffy-body was naked, but she was only in the Buffy-body, not of it; she was eternal, she was cool, she was still water. And all this time she could feel her limbs rooting into the ground, and she thought that she might turn into a tree, and sprout flowers herself, but she was pulled along, tugged from the ground, and running away from the box on the ground and the hole in the earth, now hidden by weeds.

They were inside now, and she was cold still. The voice said, "Here, pet, a blanket," and she was warm again. He kissed her trembling lips, and she knew him again, and knew him wholly, and they could be together here, nameless and innocent, or at least as nameless and innocent as she chose. He moved to leave, but she reached out for him, or her body did, and he turned, and in turning, yielded utterly to her.

"Please," her lips moved, and he was undressing her, with eyes, and his hands, and then his lips in turn, because there was nothing to undress but her heart and her spirit, hidden behind her nakedness, hidden within her like the secret of her death.

The flowers wilted outside while he said, "Buffy, my Buffy." She was his goddess and all things were alive in this tomb, all things bright in this night, while their bodies burned like fire and shone like ice.

* * *

Buffy awoke before the sun had yet risen, and her breath was slow and unhurried. She glanced around the room, at the mess of her sheets, at the faint light hovering outside her windows, willing herself to feel, willing herself not to wake.

**A lover grateful for the flattering lies of a dream **

Ah, Floralba!, I dreamt that... Shall I say it?  
Yes, for dream it was: that we made love.  
And who, if not a lover who was dreaming,  
could blend with such a heaven such a hell?

My flames then with your snow and with your ice,  
as often with his quiver's different darts,  
Love sought to mix, and mixed quite decently,  
my wakeful adoration to match well.

And I said: "May Love, may my fate decree  
that I should never sleep, if I'm awake,  
and if I sleep now, never leave this bed."

But from this sweet discord I soon awoke;  
and I found that I was alive with death,  
and I found that with living I was dead.

_trans. Alex Inger_


End file.
